Does anyone know of the build that used a God Mode then hid in Phase shift when God Mode was down?

heh.. i see what you did there....

Counterpoint: If a Monkey runs ahead and agro's 3 full spawns of badguys and cuts them down in 15 seconds and there's no teammates back resting at the room entrance to see it, is it still awesome?

Yes, but Eclipse is overrated. I wouldn't call it a "God Mode"

Yes, monkeys with blades are high up there on the awesome scale

I kinda agree with that, but not completely. Since it gives no status protection/resists, dmg buff, or rec/regen bonus it doesn't seem to be quite like other god mode powers. But being able to cap all of your resists (pretty easily, including psi) and filling your end bar isn't too shabby.....and w/o the crash at the end. Though with the capped dmg from sunless mire and decent defense, it sure feels like god mode.....but that's combining multiple things.

Edit: I guess you might need dwarf mire to for capped dmg, but it's still a ton w/o it.

But for me, greens and etheral shift are "other mitigators."

The trade off, and its a matter of preference, is that an all resistance set (if there ever is one made: there isn't one yet) would often be trading "probably dead quickly" with "definitely dead eventually." They do tend to be more predictable in behavior, but that predictability isn't free. Its just a question of which costs you want to pay.

We're also dealing strictly with damage mitigation, and setting aside the elephant in the room when it comes to defense vs resistance comparisons: debuffing.


That whole "I'm at full health, no wait I'm dead" thing does happen, but its not common at all. I've played every combination of defense vs everything else, and its not something I especially worry about much. It happens, but if you keep throwing yourself at higher and higher threat levels, you'll die eventually of something. It'll be bad luck with a defense set, but it'll be something else with something else (or not: Regen sometimes dies from bad luck bursts too).

If you don't keep throwing yourself at such situations, then you might not die ever. But in that case, its not so much Defense or Resistance (or Regeneration or +Health) that you need, so much as it is you just need enough to deal with the maximum threat you're ever going to allow yourself to experience. For every combination of mitigators, there's generally an "enough" unless you are at the point where you mandatorily need multiple overlapping mitigators.

Yeah, but where's the fun in that? I'm not going to bother building a softcapped toon to fight at +1/x1 with no AVs

It's a matter of personal experience, and I'm not expecting that every player should have the same standards as me. Like I mentioned before, it depends on how you play the game.

For the stuff I throw myself at, and the situations that I get into every time I play, getting two-shotted in a couple seconds is a very common ocurance :/

My most "squishy" toon is a Fire/Shield Scrapper with softcapped defenses, 90% DDR, 2k hitpoints, 35% S/L resistances and 300% regeneration. She is the most squishy because the situations she gets into are more extreme than those my Blaster faces (Scrapper being in the middle of the action while the Blaster hovers high above and shoots at leisure). While my Electric Tanker and Brute are far more survivable, having a healthy combination of resistance and defense which allows them to be main aggro-holders in the STF and RSF (respectively) with minimal-to-moderate support

I don't even turn on my toggles for that.


When you can find me a situation like that where an all resistance character with no other damage mitigation can survive long enough to do anything productive, I'll retract my comment. Otherwise, all you're saying is that soft-capping alone isn't as good as the maximum possible all-around build you can make, which is not the same thing as saying soft-capping alone is worse than capped resistances alone, which is the only thing I'm disagreeing with.

Positron AV: Radiation Blasts that do massive -def, Lingering Radiation that kills your recharge and regen for 30 seconds and a godmode [Overcharge]. He deals energy damage only, thankfully, and my Electric Brute with 90% energy resistance was able to take him out in a 1on1 with no temps (and I don't remember using any insps, but I might've)

Now don't get me wrong, I do know the difference between being at the 75% resistance cap (on most ATs except Tankers and Brutes) and deflecting 90% of incoming damage on a defense softcapped toon. Both resistances and defense have their pros and cons and IMO neither is better or worse than the other, they're just two different methods of damage mitigation.

That's why I prefer, like I said a couple posts ago, to have a toon with decent levels of both defenses and resistances. Defense debuffs are very common ingame, which leads to cascading failure unless you're /SR or /SD, so it's always nice to have the resistance to fall back on.

All I'm saying is that the defense softcap is overrated, really. And that a build with only softcapped defenses alone won't be the unkillable toon of doom everyone makes it out to be (IMO). Thankfully this situation almost never happens ingame though, as toons with softcapped defenses usually have other means of mitigation (inspirations for example).

That being said, I wouldn't dare approach a dangerous situation without at least softcapped defenses.